Taylor Brook

Lore (2023)

flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, percussion, violin, viola, and cello.

Lore was written for Aventa Ensemble in the Summer and Fall of 2022. Lore is a set of six “songs,” each focusing on a different lead instrument or instruments.

I - Credo, cello leads
II - Deviances, clarinet and percussion lead
III - Routines / Games, flute and violin lead
IV - Lament, oboe and viola lead
V - Whirl, Pivot, and Orbit, horn lead
VI - Incantation, no leader

I call these pieces “songs,” despite having no voice part, to help conjure a sense of imaginary musical tradition. Each of the songs is envisioned as belonging to a musical tradition in another reality, perhaps an alternate version of our own history. These imaginary musical traditions have their own unique performance practice, understanding of musical meaning, expression, and sense of cultural place.

Livingry and Ways of Seeing (2023)

baritone, piano, and two keyboards

Livingry and Ways of Seeing was written in the Summer and Fall of 2022 for Jeffrey Gavett.

This piece is a set of six songs for a baritone who also plays acoustic piano accompanied by two keyboards. The two keyboards are used to simulate retuned pianos, each song featuring a different tuning for the keyboards. The text for this piece is made from excerpts of Ways of Seeing by John Berger and poems by Gracie Leavitt from her Livingry collection. The songs alternate between the prose of Berger, discussing aesthetics, and the emotive poetry of Leavitt. The song titles and texts are as follows:

            I - Ways of Seeing (John Berger)

            II - Nonce Hex For “Romantic Love, The Last Illusion,” which will “[Keep] Us Alive Until The Revolution Come” (Gracie Leavitt)

            III - Holbein’s Ambassadors (John Berger)

            IV - The Sticks, Wilily (Gracie Leavitt)

            V - Publicity (John Berger)

            VI - Amygdala Madrigal (Gracie Leavitt)

The Machine Stops (2022)

baritone, 2 keyboards, 2 percussion

The Machine Stops was written for Jeffrey Gavett and Yarn and Wire between the Summer of 2020 through the Winter of 2021, setting fragments of text from E.M. Forster’s short story of the same name.
The Machine Stops in an oddity in the output of E.M. Forster, an unusually prescient science fiction short story describing a future where all of humanity are living beneath the surface of the Earth in a machine through which they have their every need met. Forster’s story is predictive of many aspects of our current condition, both literally and by analogy. This piece sets seven fragments of text from The Machine Stops, providing glimpses of the characters and world that Forster envisioned.
The creation of this piece was made possible with generous support of the SOCAN Foundation.

Pileup (2020)

trumpet, piano, and percussion

Pileup is dedicated to the Splice Ensemble for the occasion of Splice Festival, 2020. This recording is from the premiere in Oxford, Ohio.

This piece is focused on the integration of a computer improvisor with live performers. After the computer improvisor has been “trained” in guided solo improvisations, the software analyzing the incomoning audio for a variety of features. Later in the piece the computer improvisor then listens and reacts to the improvising trio using the audio material from the solos. In this group section, the computer improvisor moves between a set of predetermined behaviors that define how it reacts, or does not react, to what it hears from the live musicians.

The behaviors of the computer improvisor as well as the instructions for the live improvisors are sequenced to create a gradual build up of intensity until all the sound has “piled up” to maximum saturation.

Cube (2018)

trumpet, trombone, tenor sax, bass, and live electronics

Cube was written for the International Contemporary Ensemble in the Winter of 2018.
The title, Cube, comes from the idea of the four instrumentalists arranged in a square with the extra dimension of
depth added by electronics. Each of the four performers is paired with a set of stereo speakers that both amplify
their instrument and enhance their parts using per-made soundfiles.
The music itself explores harmonic ideas in extended just intonation system, focusing on a tonic of E, but at times
drifting far afield from this central pitch. The microtonal harmonies are most clearly perceived in slow, drone-like
sections where the pacing of the music is modeled on breathing. These slow sections are juxtaposed with energetic
solos and duos where each instrument has a chance to emerge from the texture and lead the ensemble.

Concert recording by International Contemporary ensemble at Abrones Arts Center NYC, March 2018. Mixed by Taylor Brook.

Drifts (2017/2011)

string quartet

Drifts is a set of five short pieces for string quartet, written for the JACK quartet in the winter of 2016/2017. The first of the five pieces, Florescences, was originally written for Quatuor Bozzini in 2011 and has been lightly revised and treated as the departing point for Drifts. While these five pieces were envisioned as a set and are ideally played together, each one can may be played seperately as a stand-alone piece.
     These pieces explore the idea of “tonal drift,” which is the result of modulation in a just intonation context. In 12-tone equal temperament, a series of modulations by a just major third will cycle back to the initial key after three modulations. However,
the same number of modulations by the just major third will result in landing roughly a quarter-tone below the initial tonal center, having drifted away from an equal temperament tonic.
     Drifts takes several approaches to tonal drift, with each piece focusing in on a different type of cadential movement to create the sense of modulation. The first movement, Florescences, works with a standard tonal V-I classical cadence, modulating to the just minor seventh repeatedly. The second movement, Phrygia, reinterprets the basic idea of a Phrygian cadence, with various small just intervals
heard in place of the usual semitone movement of the flat second to the tonic. The third movement, Organum, draws upon early polyphony, focusing on parallel fourths and creating a sense of cadence through movement to the octave in first species counterpoint. The fourth movement, Floria, plays with florid two-part counterpoint, functioning as a kind of fast movement in the overall form of Drifts and also relying upon the octave as a way to suggest a tonal center. The fifth and final movement, Ars Nova, reworks cadences from the Ars Nova period.

Flux Candrix (2017)

saxophone quartet

Flux Candrix was written for the New Thread Saxophone Quartet in the winter of 2016/2017.

This piece toys with the history of the saxophone, an instrument invented by Alphonso Sax in Belgium and first gaining widespread adoration through American Jazz and Swing music in the first half of the 20th century. I was interested in the oddity that is the early European version of jazz music and what was lost and gained in its appropriation and voyage over the Atlantic. Examples from Krenek’s Johnny Spielt Auf and portions of Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat provide perfect cases of quirky European translations of Jazz.

The Belgian saxophone player and band leader, Fud Candrix, was a leading figure in European jazz and swing in the 1930s and 1940s. After Nazi Germany loosened laws regarding the performance of the so-called degenerate American jazz music, Candrix performed with his big band in the posh casinos of Baden Baden for Germany’s elite citizenry. A propaganda film that featured these lavish Baden Baden casinos (including a fashion show complete with kimono prop) is scored with Candrix’s song, Spaziergang. It is this song that provided the basic materials for this piece, in a certain sense bringing the music back over the Atlantic to the United States, forming what could be a translation of a translation. This piece does not begin with overtly referential material from Spaziergang, instead moving towards it gradually, creating an original form and narritive arc using obscured references and allusions.

Fud Candrix is associated primarily with his music, and one could defend his subservience with the claim that he was simply an apolitical musician who found himself in the service of the Third Reich by circumstance. On the other hand, all art is political and artists have a choice to face the politics of their time. As the human race presently approaches what feels like a tipping point, the story of Fud Candrix could illuminate some of the complexities of being an individual working on the sidelines of power.

soprano, flute, clarinet, percussion, and violin

Amalgam focuses on orchestration, or more precisely, the mixture and unification of the instrumental forces into one unit. This idea of amalgamation through orchestration is approached in two ways. The first approach aims at fusion, building up a complex form of unison playing, matching frequencies, rhythms, and timbres to create a unified monophonic texture. This extended unison is developed
throughout the first large section of the piece.
     The second half of the piece explores heterophonic textures: a unison line created by the combination of different elements from by different instruments. Instead of true unison and monophony, fusion through connected and contrasting instrumental lines is the goal.

baritone, trumpet, trombone, and bass clarinet

The second volume of Ouaricon Songs was written for Loadbang Ensemble and is scored for baritone, trumpet,
trombone, and bass clarinet. The first volume was written for string quartet and baritone.
    The word, Ouaricon, comes from the name of a river on a 1715 French map of the Eastern Canada and may be
the origin of the Oregon County, and later State, name. I invoke the word here to suggest a possible alternate
history of the North American land mass by recombining, remixing, and extrapolating from traditions of art and
music.

Incantation (2015)

percussion quartet

Incantation is dedicated to the Architek Percussion Quartet of Montreal and was written during the Fall of 2014.

The title, Incantation, comes from musicologist Tomlinson’s Music and Renaissance Magic, which looks at the importance of music as a magical force in ritual through examining the treatise of renaissance scholars/magi. While my music is often conceptualized along the lines of imaginary musical tradition, literary inspiration, or some sort of technical inquiry, this piece searches no further than the sounds of the instruments and the musical ideas it contains. Instead, this piece considers a musical performance as casting a spell: a musical incantation.

baritone and string quartet

Ouaricon Songs, vol 1, for baritone and string quartet, explores American folk music through historical recordings from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Before I began writing this piece, I listened through many of these folk recordings from the early 20th century in search of oddities and unusual characteristics in the singing. After selecting several pieces of audio from the archives, I made detailed transcriptions, taking note of the precise tuning and timbral qualities found therein. Indeed, I discovered that often the singing was "out of tune" according to what is considered standard tuning today.

The idea of using historical folk materials stems from an interest in alternate histories and imagined traditions. The title of this work refers to a French map from 1859 showing the river of Ouaricon leading to a large geographic area in what is today the Western United States. This word may have been the origin of the Oregon, although this is not for certain. The familiar folk music sources have been made strange in this piece by the way I altered, embellished, and mixed them together, exposing a new and unusual angle that may evoke what music may have been like in an imaginary land of Ouaricon.

soprano, mezzo, counter-tenor, tenor, baritone, bass

Motorman Sextet is a work for six vocalists and was written for ekmeles vocal ensemble and is dedicated to Jeff Gavett.
    This vocal sextet sets the text of 11 chapters in 9 movements from David Ohle’s classic cult science fiction novel Motorman. This piece is part of a larger work that will eventually set the entire novel. The particular chapters used in Motorman Sextet are all descriptions of past events from the point-of-view of the central character, Moldenke, which together have a generally nostalgic mood.

string quartet

"El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan" is a suite of six songs for string quartet, written for the JACK quartet in the Fall/Winter of 2012-2013. The titles of the songs are:

I - Altercation
II - Pedals
III - Strumming
IV - Following
V -Lament
VI -- Coils

The title of the work comes from a short story by Borges, which describes a conception of time where all possible outcomes of any given situation realized and co-exist. This idea speaks to alternate histories and the concept of multi-dimensionality or "many-worlds". In this string quartet I have begun to imagine an alternate history of music, perhaps forking off somewhere in ancient times. In approaching this idea, I considered how musical development is influenced by perception and cognition and is built upon through notation and exposure to novel ideas and outside influences.

Stranger Dance (2011)

prepared piano, bass clarinet, and flute

Stranger Dance contrasts two basic musical ideas. The first idea is based on a recording of a moan that has been slowed down to become thirty times longer than the original. A few seconds of this slowed down moan was used as a model (perhaps even a theme) for the music in a purely subjective and imprecise way — something closer to inspiration than transcription or transposition. This first section of the work explores this moan idea, through a duo between the flute and saxophone. The influences of the moan on the
music itself result in the choice of pitches and use of slow glissandi as well as the lack of any steady pulse and abrupt changes in the texture.

The second section features a prepared piano solo with the flute and clarinet performing an accompaniment of mainly multiphonics. The musical idea in this section is based upon rhythmic variations that function in reference to an ever-present rhythmic cycle. This idea is loosely based on rhythmic cadences (tihai) from Indian classical music. The preparations in the piano allow for complex rhythms and inharmonic timbres to sound from the performance of white-note runs in the octave above middle C.

The third and final section of the work presents a synthesis of the first two sections, giving the overall form: A - B - A+B.

solo violin with percussion quartet

This violin concerto is dedicated to violinist, Mira Benjamin.

The title, Faith in Numbers, is taken from a popular science documentary by James Burke of the same name, which shows how technology emerges from seemingly unconnected events in history. This title doesn’t refer to faith in a religious sense, but to signify a complete trust in something or someone. I chose this title for my composition because of the utilization of the same basic proportions in all structural levels. By doing this, the reiteration of simple numbers and ratios, applied to different aspects of the composition, combine to form a complex whole.